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Research

Sustainable Catalysis with Earth-abundant Metals

We are a young and dynamic research group at the Chemistry Department of Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Our research projects are located at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry, sustainable catalysis and organometallic chemistry.

One of the most daunting challenges in chemistry is to develop environmentally friendly and efficient catalytic processes that contribute to advancing towards a more sustainable chemical industry. Catalysis plays a pivotal role in addressing the urgent demand of achieving green production of high-value chemicals from abundant and renewable feedstocks.

On the quest of more sustainable organic synthesis, our research group focuses on the discovery and development of earth-abundant metal-catalyzed organic reactions. The exploration of base metals (Mn, Fe, Co, Ni) in catalysis is still in an early stage in comparison to noble metals (for instance, Pd, Rh, Ir). The unique chemical properties of base metals, together with creative ligand design, offers an outstanding opportunity to discover innovative catalytic methodologies.

In our group we apply a bottom-up approach towards catalyst design aiming at providing the state-of-the-art catalysts to solve long-standing challenging organic transformations. Particularly, we are interested in C-H functionalization reactions, C-heteroatom bond forming processes and asymmetric transformations with base metals.

Our research topics span from the traditional areas of organic and organometallic chemistry to photo- and electrochemistry. In addition, modern spectroscopic and theoretical methods are integrated in our projects for shedding light into catalytic reactive intermediates. Gaining mechanistic undestanding is essential to apply a rational design towards the invention or re-design of metal-catalyzed organic reactions.